The House With Narrow Windows

On a languid street corner near the old high-school was a house I was always fascinated by. It was a large house, with peeling paint, and narrow windows revealing bits and pieces of the rooms within. On the bus in the morning I could see a warm, incandescent glow illuminating a cramped kitchen, in the afternoon I could see the faded lettering on the sign out front. It may have once been a restaurant, or a small hotel, or some other business that had long since fled.

I imagined who must live there. An old man, worn by time. An austere life, a life defined by struggle. I imagined how grown up I would feel living that imagined life. I felt sad that it wasn’t mine.

On a forgotten corner of a narrow street that crossed the local bike path sat a house with narrow windows. I always thought it was an apartment. When I was young I took my bike out at the blue hour and imagined who must live there. A warm light glowed through the blinds, cutting through the cool blue atmosphere. I was barely a teenager then.

I imagined the young professional that must live there. He had game nights with his friends, he listened to grown up music and lived a grown up life. I imagined how mature and liberated I would feel living in a place like that. I felt sad that it wasn’t mine.

I got older. My life changed. My perspectives changed. I saw that house near the school again, and it looked run-down. I saw that house on the path, and it looked sterile. Where did the warmth retreat to? Where did that young professional go? Where did the austere old man end up? Did they ever live in those places?

I have never met the owners of these places. I don’t know their name nor their face. I never want to. The people who live there I already know and the lives they live give me life.

Systems Theory

My head is full and my heart is empty. Another day another day another day, marching towards graduation. Like so many other mornings I sit in a lecture picking up what the professor puts down on the board. Outside snow dances in the twilight, pirouetting in the icy winds. Its odd, I’ve been going here for years but it still feels like a foreign place. I know the best sitting places for charging my laptop, the best bathrooms with the fewest people, the fastest routes above and below ground to each building, but it still feels all wrong. And the snow falls falls falls painting an unfamiliar world in a cold wet layer.

The function of a silicon diode is relatively simple. A voltage is applied and as it approaches a certain limit the current it allows through increases in an exponential relationship. So simple so simple so simple yet it is the ground on which the entirety of modern computing technology is built. From it came the transistor, and from the transistor came the logic gate. AND OR NOT NOR NAND XOR INV the names of the roots from which springs adders and subtractors, multiplexers and demultiplexers, ROM and RAM. Even further still ALUs, registers, I/O interfaces, and on into CPUS and GPUS. How brilliant to learn the foundations of a world most take for granted?

Yet still still still I sit here waiting for something to happen. I know it all, I test well, I see the pattern language of which the entire world is composed yet nothing nothing nothing feels like it should.

When I was a kid I had visions of university life. Fiery social situations, art and soul everywhere, adventure and new experiences. Yet, the experience I came to learn was one of quiet and solitude. New experiences, sure, but rare. In general, more of the same with a slightly different coat of paint. Maybe I was desensitized to new things in the same way our eyes perceive color less vibrantly as we age. How horrible? Irreversible magic death. Nothing new under the sun sun sun so they say.

Have you ever seen a picture of a city in Russia during the blue hour? Let me paint it for you. A single light on in an endless Soviet apartment block. Gray skies and yellow street lights. The dull dull dull grays of a life among the ruins. Its cozy isn’t it? To imagine a sparse apartment, a jar of pickles in a cupboard, and a loaf of bread on the counter. A couch with holes in the fabric. A television older than the students who live there. Strangers strangers strangers in a homely homely homely land.

Alienation. Not a nation of aliens or a strange EDM artist from 2004. Alienation. Having no place. I know so much about how the parts fit together. I know about how the wholes interact into even larger wholes. Systems within systems systems systems ever and ever increasing in complexity. I know how it all works. I could build the infrastructure. Yet it doesn’t work for me. And I feel the same same same.

The Talking Heads, surely you’ve heard of them? “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was” David Byrne would echo with increasing hysteria into the microphone on Once In a Lifetime. “Well, how did I get here?” he would ask before launching into the chorus. A question I ask myself frequently. Where is that social ecstasy, the fire of life, community and camaraderie? I see how all these silicon parts fit together, a world designed with interlocking systems, yet outside the people seem ever more disconnected. I can piece all the systems in the world together, but the human factor remains out of reach. So I sit here, my head full and my heart empty. Waiting waiting waiting.

Guest Book

I was browsing old websites from the early 2000's and was fascinated by looking through the guest book pages. People left messages that have survived decades untouched like hieroglyphs on the walls of digital pyramids. So let's add one to The Silent Page! If you visit this site, leave a comment on this page with your name, a note, or anything else you want to save for the future! Cheers to us a few decades from now!

The Apartment (From the Cutting Room Floor)

Hello dear readers, welcome to a new format for posts here on the Silent Page! The Cutting Room Floor series will be pieces that are unfinished and probably won't ever be finished but I think are worth sharing. This first one is saved under the name "The Apartment" and tells the story of a young man cleaning out his grandfather's apartment after he passed away. 

As part of this series I will also analyze the piece to explain what I was going for, elucidate the writing process, and hopefully make it make sense.

This was my grandfather’s apartment. He lived here in the city for almost his entire retirement. In the past he had worked as a technician, repairing high tech simulators for pilots. His knowledge of applied electronics was beyond that of even the best grad students at the local university. The apartment reflected this. Technical books and drawings on tables, scopes and meters on the walls, a workbench messy with projects only he understood. The faint smell of warm solder still hung in the air.

As you can tell these sentences are pretty rough, but I was trying to setup the grandfather to be similar to my own who was a big inspiration to me. I was sort of shooting for the old "skilled technician who shows that experience outweighs knowledge" stereotype.

I stand at the threshold to his world, a manila envelope of paperwork in hand.

I personally really really like the imagery of this line. Our narrator is both literally at the threshold to the apartment but is also figuratively at the threshold to his grandfather's life as he steps into the task of organizing his things. The idea was for this story to revolve around the process of packing and labelling someone's life after they passed away - a task I was privy to with my late grandfather and one I found both disturbing and strangely beautiful. 

It was a cold day in October when I got the call. My grandfather was in the hospital, cancer, aggressive, nothing they could do. I sat down on a bench outside the building with my head in my hands. People passed by, no one said anything. Here was my inspiration in life, dying on the other side of town. I had always wanted to be like him, he had inspired me to pursue these studies and now he wouldn’t see their completion. I don’t know how long I was like that for, but I was snapped out of my rumination by the old math professor leaving to his next class. “Are you ok?” he had asked but I didn’t respond. He sat next to me in the silence. Eventually he left me to my own melancholy.

I started this project on a cold day in early October. Decided it was thematic enough of a season to base the story's exposition in. The character's sadness over his grandfather not getting to see where he ends up after being inspired by him is a personal experience I had and one I wanted to capture in the story. I think the professor's actions are a little strange and I needed to do a rewrite of the ending of the paragraph to make it less disjoint.

A few days later an envelope arrived in my mailbox. Apparently, I had been put down in the will as the one responsible for cleaning out my grandfather’s apartment. Evidently, my extended family had more important matters to attend to.

Here is where I started tying the exposition back to the story. From here it was going to be established that the narrator was the only one in the family who would handle the task of cleaning the apartment and we would follow him as he reflects on what he knew of his grandfather's life. I had little vignettes for a few different mementos he finds that were going to explore the story of his late grandfather and their relationship. I may still explore these concepts in future work but for now this is the station where the train of thought stops.

Overall, its definitely a rough, unfinished draft but I see potential in the ideas and general story outline. What do you, dear readers, think of this style of post? Yay or nay? I kind of like the idea of taking things I'll never finish and exploring them in this manner. I, personally, like seeing how authors/song writers/poets break down their works and expose their inner thought process but that may just be me. Proper pieces soon to come, stay tuned!

(Also, as an aside, if anyone has a knack for being artsy I would love to collaborate on images for these posts. I want to move away from stock images and towards lovely, original work. Reach out at the contact email if interested! - Silent Partner)